BiST Vs. In-Circuit Sensors


Monitoring the health of a chip post-manufacturing, including how it is aging and performing over time, is becoming much more important as ICs make their way into safety-critical applications such as the central brain in automobiles. Faced with longer lifespans and a growing body of functional safety rules, systems vendors need to be able to predict when a part will fail. But as sensing auto... » read more

New Uses For Manufacturing Data


The semiconductor industry is becoming more reliant on data analytics to ensure that a chip will work as expected over its projected lifetime, but that data is frequently inconsistent or incomplete, and some of the most useful data is being hoarded by companies for competitive reasons. The volume of data is rising at each new process node, where there are simply more things to keep track of,... » read more

Sensing Automotive IC Failures


The sooner you detect a failure in any electronic system, the sooner you can act. Together, data analytics and on-chip sensors are poised to boost quality in auto chips and add a growing level of predictive maintenance for vehicles. The ballooning number of chips cars makes it difficult to reach 10 defective parts per billion for every IC that goes into a car.  And requiring that for a 15-y... » read more

An Inside Look At Testing’s Leading Edge


Mike Slessor, president and CEO of FormFactor, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss testing of AI and 5G chips, and why getting power into a chip for testing is becoming more difficult at each new node. SE: How does test change with AI chips, where you've got massive numbers of accelerators and processors developed at 7 and 5nm? Slessor: A lot of the AI stuff that we've been... » read more

Which Chip Interconnect Protocol Is Better?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to the discuss the pros and cons of the Compute Express Link (CXL) and the Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX) with Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP; Richard Solomon, technical marketing manager for PCI Express controller IP at Synopsys; and Jitendra Mohan, CEO of Astera Labs. What follows are excerpts of that conversation... » read more

Inference Moves To The Network


Machine-learning inference started out as a data-center activity, but tremendous effort is being put into inference at the edge. At this point, the “edge” is not a well-defined concept, and future inference capabilities will reside not only at the extremes of the data center and a data-gathering device, but at multiple points in between. “Inference isn't a function that has to resid... » read more

Vehicle Communications Network Is Due For Overhaul


The Controller Area Network (CAN), one of the main communications networks in an automobile, is headed for a security overhaul — if not a wholesale replacement. Initially devised in the 1980s to allow electronic components in a vehicle to communicate directly without a central computer in between, the CAN bus has become a growing security risk as more functions are automated and integrated... » read more

Making Sense Of PUFs


As security becomes a principal design consideration, physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are seeing renewed interest as new players emerge onto the market. PUFs can play a central role in hardware roots of trust (HRoTs), but the messaging in the market can make it confusing to understand the different types of PUF as well as their pros and cons. PUFs leverage some uncertain aspect of som... » read more

Startup Funding: April 2020


It was another strong month for automotive startups, with one autonomous trucking company in China drawing a massive $100M investment. Another hot area was optimization of machine learning deployments, including one new company launch. Quantum computing, etch equipment, and mmWave feature in this month's look at twenty-two startups that collectively raised $375M. Semiconductors & design ... » read more

Key Drivers In New Chip Industry Outlook


How well the semiconductor industry fares over the next 12 to 24 months depends upon the evolution of a virus. That alone will determine the correct model for an economic rebound — V, U, extended U, or maybe even a double U. But what's also becoming clear is those models don't apply uniformly to all sectors or sub-sectors of the semiconductor industry. Looked at as a whole, the entire indu... » read more

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